Sunday, March 31, 2013

Is the failure of the Cyprus banks and the rumored 40% haircut taken by depositors with assets over 100,000 Euro a harbinger of things to come?

If you have managed to accumulate a nest egg, or if you are in the process of doing so, just what should you do with it to keep it safe?

Is time-honored investment advice from "financial planners" still valid? Or is the "diversification" they advocate just a small and surprisingly risky slice of the investment opportunities available?

And what are you really doing when you make an investment? You're placing a bet on what you think will be valuable at some point in the future, right? What will be the value of emergency cash, municipal bonds, and company stocks, the spectrum of conventional financial diversification, in the event of a general collapse of the economy and society?

In this podcast I explore alternate forms of accumulating and preserving value.

Also, this is the first show recorded on Liberty Ridge, the soon-to-be location of Shrugger Studio. You might hear a light gust of wind in the microphone now and then, or a bird calling as he flies by. I recorded this show on the porch whilst enjoying a perfectly beautiful day (as pictured, left).

Monday, March 4, 2013

Well here we all are, in the middle of the new normal for the US, with 8% unemployment, government debt ballooning past GDP, rising taxes, increasing regulations, and rapidly growing medical costs.

For a lot of people, the new normal is starting to feel, well, normal. It's something a lot of us are learning to live with.

Tempering that sense of new normalcy is, for many people, a persistent and growing sense of anxiety. If you feel it, that's your "spidey sense" at work. Spidey sense for bad times coming.

Past downturns have conditioned us to expect that things will get better soon. Some day they will, eventually, but in my view we are on a long, slow, downhill slide that could suddenly get steeper, or hit the wall, without much warning.

The unsustainable debt and demographic bomb are not going away. The "Sequester" and how it unfolded should convince you that avoiding a financial and societal collapse is well beyond our politics. Politics in America has become a reason-free zone.

Now is NOT the time to assume that a turnaround is near. Now is not the
time to become complacent. Do not put off your preparations for what is
coming. Our dependency culture is getting worse, not better. The rift between the makers and the takers is getting bigger, not smaller.

We're not coming out of the woods, we're going deeper into them. Keep prepping.

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